Safari #3 The Serengeti Plains and Ngorogoro Crater

ngorogoro Travel Blog

I think maybe the Serengeti was hyped up too much. I felt there was a lot of driving around involved and not much action. We saw a lot of sleeping lions. We saw a few more leopards. One was sleeping in a tree with her impala kill. SAfter a while she started to climb down the tree with the kill hanging from her magnificantly strong jaws...and then up popped a little baby leopard. It was so cute, you could just see its little head bouncing around above the grass as mummy walked along. The coolest thing I saw while most of the group went ballooning was a cheetah...it walked right across our drive path! They are such beautiful animals, very graceful. The funny thing was, I started a joke with our guide...I would request sighting at the start of the day. This day I asked if he could find us a cheetah. Not one sleeping like yesterday...that just wasn't good enough. I wanted one to be walking around, eating an impala if possible. We didn't see the impala but having one walk about 2m from the truck was good enough for me. Plus, later that day we saw a pack of 5 eating a deer-like animal. I had to wait a few hours but I can forgive him that. Also, even though it sounds a little boring in comparison, my favourite sighting was actually the thousands of wildebeast migrating across the plains to greener grass. It was overwhelming...just to be there rather that watching it on TV. Plus, their fur looked really soft and I wanted to pet them.

The crater was a little relaxed. We didn't really see anything really exciting but the scenery was absolutely amazing. We almost whitnessed a kill again but again the lion gave up too soon. Now she just had to wait about another hour for the zebra to forget. We did go back about an hour later and the zebra were starting to relax already despite her standing in clear view. That was quite amusing. We did have our first sighting of an older male lion with a dark mane...but yes he was sleeping.

Overall the coolest parts of the drive were the pop-top mini buses we used. Standing up with my upper body dangerously handing out the top of the bus as we drove about 80mph down a bumpy track. 'White knuckle ride' comes to mind.